ADEN: an environment for digital receiver ASIC design

Different levels of abstraction are suited for algorithm design and hardware architecture development. This paper presents a tool (ADEN) that provides a link from system design to VLSI implementation. It generates synchronous timed descriptions of digital hardware from dynamic data-flow system level configurations. It allows one to make use of optimized architectures available for a broad range of communication system components. These components are kept in the extensible ComBox library which provides a means to characterize their data-flow and timing properties. The design methodology together with the tool operation and the library concept are explained. An actual design example is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.